Category: ideas

“Whether you celebrate Christmas or Hanukkah or both or none of the above, religion is hard not to notice at this time of year. Even so, many Americans observe the holiday without mentioning God. But can you really give and receive holiday gifts without attaching some religious significance?” A New York Times debate.

“Both [Out-of-Body Experiences and Near-Death Experiences] … cause hallucinations so vivid and compelling that those who experience them may deny the term hallucination, and insist on their reality. … But the fundamental reason that hallucinations – whatever their cause or modality – seem so real is that they deploy the very same systems in the brain that actual perceptions do.

“Around the world today, some 7000 distinct languages are spoken … more languages in one species of mammal than there are mammalian species. … If language evolved to allow us to exchange information, how come most people cannot understand what most other people are saying?” Because of a deep human instinct …

The custom is old but not ancient, dating back to the High Middle Ages. And there seems to be one famous individual responsible.

Leszek Kolakowski: “Both Buddhism and Christianity suggest that the ultimate liberation of the soul is also perfect serenity: total peace of the spirit. And perfect serenity is tantamount to perfect immutability … like the happiness of a stone. Do we really want to say that a stone is the perfect embodiment of salvation and Nirvana? … We are told that Nirvana entails the abandonment of the self. This might be taken to suggest that there can be … happiness without a subject – just happiness, unrelated to anyone’s being happy. Which seems absurd.”

“After 20 years of opining on weighty bilateral issues like NATO expansion and ballistic missile defense, the political analyst Nikolai V. Zlobin recently found himself trying to explain, for an uncomprehending Russian readership, the American phenomenon of the teenage baby sitter.”

“The founders of the Museum of Mathematics (MoMath) know they have a fight on their hands, given the pervasive idea that the subject is boring, hard and scary. But they are determined to give mathematics a makeover, with exhibits that express an unselfconscious, giddy joy in exploring the world of numbers and forms.”

“‘My, what a big mouth you have, Grandma,’ says Little Red Riding Hood, with just a hint of suspicion. The wolf sneezes. ‘Bless you,’ says the little girl. Sound odd? That’s because this snippet of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ was written not by a person but by a piece of software called Xapagy. It may not seem like much, but it demonstrates a first step towards computers that can invent stories.”

And it’s time that airlines acknowledge that, says the Federal Communications Commission. (But do we really want annoying people on their cell phones during flights?)

Oliver Sachs: “Artists and painters and even some scientific discoveries have come from not what we would describe as rational consciousness but some other dreamlike or hallucinatory state.”